City of Sanibel officials said Thursday evening they have confirmed at least two fatalities, while Smith said Friday there could be four.
More than 500 individuals were rescued in Lee and Charlotte Counties, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and search and rescue operations are continuing. There were 600-700 rescues in the county as of Saturday morning, the sheriff’s office said.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue have been involved in search and rescue efforts, including in Sanibel and Captiva. Many rescues were made in waist-high water, public safety officials said Thursday.
Use of direct-to-consumer DNA tests have exploded over the past decade, with an estimated 100 million people worldwide sharing their genetic information with companies like AncestryDNA, 23andMe, and FamilyTreeDNA. All that DNA has been a boon to law-enforcement agencies, who’ve discovered that “investigative genetic genealogy” is far more effective if searches aren’t restricted to DNA left at a crime scene.
By just uploading the genetic profile of a suspect to a genealogy website, where thousands of users have freely shared their DNA information to find out more about their ancestry, detectives are able to map out a criminal’s entire family tree and zero in on their identity.
